Job postings and interviews with senior security officials at Anthropic show that the frontier AI lab is building out an extensive monitoring system to keep tabs on activists who oppose the rapid development of artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
In addition to monitoring activists in the vicinity of Anthropic executives and keeping tabs on protests near physical Anthropic assets, the firm is also implementing a \u201cpre-crime\u201d approach, attempting to predict incidents before they happen. In some cases, that also means reporting suspects to police before a crime occurs. Anthropic did not respond to the Prospect\u2019s request for comment.<\/p>\n
Anthropic\u2019s plans to surveil dissent are at odds with the firm\u2019s efforts to cast itself as the responsible alternative to OpenAI. At the beginning of the year, the Department of Defense and Anthropic engaged in a high-profile dustup over Anthropic\u2019s refusal to allow the military to use its tools for mass domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. That tension seems to have eased as Anthropic hires<\/a> for \u201cnational security sales\u201d positions, seeking to restart military contracts. The increase in threat monitoring of domestic opponents fits with a renewed focus on national security.<\/p>\n More from Daniel Boguslaw<\/a><\/p>\n A piece of Anthropic\u2019s surveillance architecture was revealed in a podcast interview from last year between Anthropic Global Security Operations Center Manager Keon Ellison, Security Operations Manager Zach Melvin, and James Neufeld, CEO of Samdesk, a company Anthropic contracts with for risk detection.<\/p>\n In a wide-ranging conversation about threat monitoring and analysis, the interview also touches on monitoring activists. \u201cLast year we had an executive travel into a major city when we received some intelligence through Samdesk about a planned protest,\u201d Ellison said. The originally scheduled protest was moved up due to permitting issues. \u201cSamdesk gave us about 60 minutes of advanced notice that the protest organizers had moved the timeline,\u201d Ellison explained. \u201cThat extra hour was critical. Without it our executives would have departed their meetings, they would have ran right into the heart of the disruption.\u201d<\/p>\n Ellison said that Anthropic used this data to devise an alternate route for the executive and funnel them to a service entrance at the hotel. \u201cWhat could have been a high-stress situation,\u201d he said, \u201cwas really mitigated through early detection through Samdesk and giving us that information.\u201d<\/p>\n Anthropic has begun making routine reports to police departments across the country for threats, and told<\/a> The Wall Street Journal in July, \u201cWe track concerning behavior over time through a person-of-interest process, allowing us to catch escalation patterns early.\u201d According to the Journal, \u201cseveral individuals involved in incidents reported to police were already being tracked by Anthropic security.\u201d<\/p>\n Last month, The San Francisco Standard reported<\/a> that Anthropic had reported a man to San Francisco police for telling Claude that he had bought an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and had CEO Dario Amodei \u201cin his sights.\u201d When the Standard contacted the man in question, he told the newspaper he was \u201cjust fucking around.\u201d<\/p>\n But while Anthropic was fast to call the cops on a frustrated Claude user, the Standard also reported a key detail: Anthropic refused to show police the actual messages, citing Anthropic\u2019s internal policy. In short, Anthropic reported a user for in-platform speech, and then refused to provide police with evidence of actual wrongdoing.<\/p>\n This kind of pre-crime policing, encouraged without due process, is referenced as an explicit goal by Anthropic\u2019s security program manager in the podcast reviewed by the Prospect. \u201cThe goal would be transforming operations from reactive information to gathering proactive and predictive and preventative threat engagement and management,\u201d he said, adding, \u201cThat\u2019s the kind of operational maturity that makes sense for protecting high-value targets in any industry.\u201d<\/p>\n Anthropic\u2019s effort to build a predictive security apparatus extends beyond the C-suite to its Global Safety, Intelligence, and Security (GSIS) team, according to a job posting from last month detailing Anthropic\u2019s search for an enterprise intelligence specialist who \u201cwill investigate specific threats, actors, and events, produce finished assessments, and help keep Anthropic\u2019s employees ahead of a rapidly evolving threat landscape and in a defensible position.\u201d<\/p>\n Part of that role, compensated at between $180,000 and $230,000, will be to \u201cidentify, assess, track, and investigate global threats including geopolitical instability, terrorism, crime, activism, nation-state targeting of the AI sector, and emerging security trends, including deep-dive research and OSINT collection on specific threats, actors, and events\u201d (emphasis added).<\/p>\n The expansion of Anthropic\u2019s intelligence-gathering to a national and even global scale tracks with recent efforts to heighten the labeling of AI and the infrastructure powering it, including data centers and power supply. A critical infrastructure designation would put artificial intelligence on the same footing as water, electricity, and broadband. And indeed, AI\u2019s boosters like Americans for Responsible Innovation (ARI) have urged<\/a> the Trump administration to make the change. Per ARI\u2019s telling, AI is \u201cso vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters.\u201d<\/p>\n Enshrining frontier labs in the hardened cloak of national security would not only give Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google even more access to intelligence products generated by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies; it would also embolden these companies to shape how federal agencies view threats to their bottom line, now transformed as \u201ccritical infrastructure.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s not hard to imagine how civic engagement by the same bipartisan coalition opposing data centers could turn its focus onto AI, only to be branded in the same instant as extremists or, even worse, terrorists. Anthropic\u2019s answer to this problem has been to work even harder at producing artificial intelligence that can deliver services that can\u2019t be brushed aside by the public.<\/p>\n \u201cI do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don\u2019t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI\u2019s risks,\u201d Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote on Twitter last month. \u201cI think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust \u2026 I think that ordinary people don\u2019t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.\u201d<\/p>\n As Anthropic ramps up its efforts to monitor dissent with in-house intelligence teams and real-time protest tracking powered by AI, it will have to contend with the increasing economic desperation that plagues human beings outside its Bay Area towers. Last week, the security guards who patrol the campuses of OpenAI and Anthropic announced that they had authorized<\/a> a strike over stalled pay negotiations. In response, Anthropic sent<\/a> a company-wide email telling employees that it was best if they worked from home.<\/p>\n